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The Manhattan Rare Book Company
Specializing in the beautiful, important, and very hard to find.
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HINE, LEWIS W Men At Work
$20,000.00
”This is a book of Men at Work; men of courage, skill, daring and imagination… We call this the Machine Age. But the more machines we use the more do we need real men to make and direct them…
“I will take you into the heart of modern industry where machines and skyscrapers are being made, where the character of the men is being put into the motors, the airplanes, the dynamos upon which the life and happiness of millions of us depend…”
FIRST EDITION, AN EXTRAORDINARY FAMILY COPY INSCRIBED BY HINE TO HIS WIFE: “To Sara / Lewis W. Hine.”.
With signed letter to Hine from legendary New Yorker Al Smith who at the time was president of the Empire State company, thanking him for the “very fine photographic record” of the construction of the Empire State Building. Smith was the governor of New York from 1923-1928 and was the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, losing to Herbert Hoover.
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Men at Work is one of the most curious photography books of the twentieth century and a book full of contradictions. It was supposedly published for children and adolescents, but its austere layout and unflinching text (at one point, for example, Hine notes that rock dust will shorten the drillers’ lives) seems at odds with the intended audience; it seems to celebrate not only the workers, but modern industry, from a man who spent his life being severely critical of the dangers and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism; and it poses as a work of dispassionate reportage, but Hine has carefully composed his shots with a clear aesthetic eye.
And it is this last point that has made the book endure. For beyond the social commentary or documentary record, what we’re left with is a breathtakingly beautiful book. In the photographs, the workers often remind one of gymnasts, acrobats (Philippe Petite comes to mind), and dancers. The city is very much a character – Hine took many of his pictures from a crane, capturing glorious bird’s eye views of New York. If you look at the composition of the photos, you can see the work of someone who has absorbed the modernist sensibility, with forms and shapes echoing the abstract and cubist works of the time.
So yes, Men at Work is a celebration of workers and an important documentary record of the construction of the Empire State Building and the growth of the machine age, but above all it is an artistic masterpiece, one of the most accomplished photobooks of the century.
About this copy:
Hine family copy: Inscribed by Hine to his wife Sara in ink on the front free endpaper, “To Sara / Lewis W. Hine.” Clearly this was an important family copy, for affixed to the rear is a typed letter signed written to Hine from Al Smith, at the time the president of Empire State, Inc., the company in charge of the construction of the Empire State Building, praising Hine’s photographs.
There is also a note of thanks pasted into the front reproducing a letter sent by Hine to Victor Goslin, the man appearing on the front of the dust jacket, and a pasted newspaper clipping about the dangers of silicosis (and a note in the text referring to this clipping where Hine mentions that breathing rock dust will shorten the workers’ lives).
Provenance: By descent to Corydon Lewis Hine, the son of Sara and Lewis Hine.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932. Quarto, original green cloth, original dust jacket; custom box. Adhesive residue on blanks at beginning and end, offsetting from newspaper clipping on half-title. Images clean. Cloth very bright; an outstanding example of the very rare dust jacket, with light edgewear and a few minor blemishes.
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